National Poetry Month Celebration: Leanne Dunic
Our National Poetry Month Celebration continues with a few selections from To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic.
A lyric travelogue that moves between Singapore, Canada, and Japan, Leanne Dunic’s 2017 debut captures what it’s like to be united while simultaneously separated from the global experience of trauma, history, and loss that colour our everyday lives. In praise of To Love the Coming End, Doretta Lau writes, “In these fervent poems of disparate landscapes are catastrophic feelings of sadness, loss, and alienation.”
Remember to follow along all month as we celebrate our poets by sharing a poem each day on the Book*hug Blog. Follow us as well on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
And now, onto today’s reading. Click on the video to watch Leanne read from To Love the Coming End and follow along with the excerpts below.
Within me, a gaping crevice. The more I change my
environment the more I lose track of myself, yet I traverse.
Maybe that’s the point. Nothing is anchored. Today is unstable,
easy for people and land to split. Minerals grind a geological
dance, the balance of the earth’s axis shifts. Chile, Indonesia,
New Zealand, Haiti, Japan. Where next? The unsure crust
hectors the Pacific Northwest, evidence of instability buried
under substrate. A story, mounds.
—
Energy is diffused through geographies. Underestimated, our
effect on the slow process of plate tectonics, oceans, atmosphere.
Surely the vastness can handle the burying of what we cannot
contain, so that there will be no more bursts of cruelty…
—
It’s possible that a love’s sole purpose is to be unrequited, to
build a pressure without release until we find an act that allows
for it to escape—to seep or burst—from us. There are the
common ones: booze, drugs, travel, academia, sex. I’ve tried
them all. Certainly, none are enough to make up for the fissure
inside—only an attempt to find a new way to breathe, to place
yourself in the world of without.
Leanne Dunic is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer. Her work has won several honours, including the 2015 Alice Munro Short Story Contest, and has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada and abroad. She is the author of To Love the Coming End (2017), and the chapbook, The Gift (2019). Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Leanne is the former Artistic Director of the Powell Street Festival Society and is the singer/guitarist of The Deep Cove.
